This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… CROSSPOST: ADRIAN MONCK [NIE HUIHUA]: How to Get a Job in the Chinese Communist PartyWith my comments appended. Adrian Monck’s introduction to the post: 3.7 million applicants. 40,000 positions. One professor’s survival guide: Renmin University professor and social media star...
With my comments appended. Adrian Monck’s introduction to the post: 3.7 million applicants. 40,000 positions. One professor’s survival guide: Renmin University Professor and social media star Nie Huihua explains what China’s civil service exam gets you – and why the prize 3.7 million applicants are chasing might not be worth winning…
The rest of it is below Adrian Monck’s paywall. But let me excerpt the list of things you need to succeed as a government official, according to Nie Huihua are:
Let me now reflect on what I have posted from Monck’s piece, and on the rest of it below his paywall: I have to start with the big and major point: Most of this is normal—for the human collective societal-organizational institution we call “bureaucracy”. Every civil service everywhere—across time, across space, across political systems—complains about the same things. The gap between what gets measured and what actually matters. The perverse incentives that emerge when you try to make legible what is fundamentally illegible. The paperwork that crowds out the actual work. The patron who falls and drags you down (or, optimistically, rises and carries you up). These are not Chinese characteristics. These are bureaucratic characteristics—as true in Washington and Brussels and Whitehall as in Beijing, as true in the 800s as in the 2000s. What makes China most interesting is not that it has a bureaucracy, and that its bureaucracy has these problems. What makes China most interesting is that it has so much bureaucracy, and has and has had it for so long. Its bureaucracy has thus had more time to think about itself and adjust itself, as a hegemonic institution, than bureaucracy has had anywhere else. That, I think, must have consequences. The keju imperial examination system ran from 607 to 1905: over 1,300 years. It was the world’s first meritocratic institution. The effects persist today—prefectures with more jinshi degree-holders in the Ming-Qing period still show higher educational attainment in 2010; a doubling of jinshi holders, an 0.7-year increase in schooling today. Tang Dynasty poets like Bai Juyi were already writing about preferring “the carefree life” to the burdens office-holding, when “palace eunuchs had gained control of the throne” and political advancement had grown uncertain. Now Chinese bureaucracy has been, historically, better than most—better than nearly all. Stability, Relative prosperity. Relative peace. Face it, in the long agrarian age, more likely than not CHINA RULED!! Why? As I see it, three reasons: First, the exam selected for competence. Second, the exam acculturated, for studying hard enough to succeed in it could not but bath the scholars’ brains in the Confucian moral philosophy that emphasizes virtue, merit, and reciprocity. Third, the exam acculturated in another way, as it trained candidates in S.O.P. that meshed with those above, below, and beside you in your position. You thus got a baseline of meritocratic competence, objective alignment, and confidence that you understood what your collaeages were likely to do. Other systems struggled to match this, and failed. But—here is the rub—since before the first Tang Emperor, “exam” and “job” have selected for different things. The exam selects for competence. The job selects for compliance with the will of your superior, who if you are lucky becomes your patreon. If you are not lucky, he makes you the fall guy and moves you out so one of his clients can move in. If you are lucky, and if your patron rises, you rise as well, with high probability. But if your patron falls, you fall. All this is par for the bureaucratic agrarian-age course. The defects of the hegemonic Confucian bureaucratic order and the scholar-bureaucrate-extractor-landholder-student-scholar cycle were small beer compared to the defects of other agrarian-age societies-of-domination. But this is no longer the agrarian age. In the modern Schumpeterian Age, stability = ossification and dysfunction as the underpinning of every single ruling-class order vanish as the mode of production earthquakes. And that puts prosperity and peace in grave danger. Plus we now have to layer on top of this the specific dysfunctions of contemporary Chinese governance. First, a great deal of Chinese local government is based on lthe sale of land development rights. That only works with rising land values. That only works with income growth. It might work, alternatively, with population growth, but without income growth you have population decline. Statistics are dodgy. But it does look like, since the plague, land sales revenue has collapsed from 2/5 to 1/5 of local government revenue. This is a dire crisis, without—so far—even a hint of a solution. Second, Chinese local government officials are tasked with conducting regional industrial development policy, including venture capital investments. They have no particular skill at these. Moreover, their incentive structure is bad: short tenures, risk aversion, pressure to show activity and so forth. That makes them likely to be systematically worse than private investors would be. And, of course, credit for any successes are taken out of the hands of worker-bee bureaucrats and grabbed by higher-upstream bosses; while the manure from failures higher up rains down. Third, since 2012 Xi Jinping has attempted to curb corruption and improve bureaucratic performance by instituting what the Russian writer Gogol dramatically wrote about in 1836 in his story of Khlestakov, who is mistaken for the real Inspector General. increased central inspections. The —central investigators examining local officials—dates to imperial times but has intensified into what Minxin Pei describes the transformation of this xunshi system as a shift “from purge to control”: rather than pruning the worst, guarding against the inevitable arrival of the Inspector General becomes a major focus of effort. Overcentralization looms. The Party-State recognizes all of this: Nie Huihua’s analyses are critique sanctioned and welcomed by the highest levels, not samizdat whispers. And yet Nie Huihua offers no systemic solutions. None. Instead, he offers a survival guide for careerists—including exercise (as you can control your health even though you control nothing else), read history (to gain a sense of how things might suddenly change and be different), and learn English (to keep as many options open as possible). Are China’s bureaucratic pathologies truly worse than those of its peer aspirants to “forging the future” status on this here globe? I think they are different in kind and—right now—more constraining:
China’s disadvantage is that the greater hegemony of the bureaucratic operating system—hierarchical resource allocation, land-finance dependence, inspection-centric control—makes discretion costly and truth dangerous. When promotion follows patrons rather than performance, risk shifts downward and blame flows downward faster. In that environment, Nie Huihua’s survival lexicon—sharp eyes, zipped lips, tireless legs—is rational. But it is not developmental. And with land sales now a fraction of pre‑pandemic revenues, local governments’ room to maneuver has shrunk at precisely the moment when experimentation is most needed. Can Xi Jinping and other forces surmount this? To a degree:
Unless the Party-State rebalances toward transparency, longer tenures, accountable budgets, and permissioned risk at the edge, China will continue to deploy capacity impressively while discovering—too late—that that was not where it actually needed most to adapt. If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…#central-country |
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